How do online students use digital technologies to manage their emotions?

Jake Hilliard ~ Learning Designer

Have you ever put on a music playlist to help you focus on a task, or turned to YouTube for a quick break when you feel stressed or overwhelmed? For many online learners, these aren’t just habits, they’re strategies for managing emotions while studying.

Last month I had the opportunity to present at the Twentieth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2025), one of Europe’s leading conferences on technology-enhanced learning (TEL). The paper I shared, co-authored with colleagues Karen Kear and Helen Donelan from The Open University’s (OU) School of Computing and Communications, explored how OU students use digital technologies to regulate their emotions while studying online.

This work forms part of a wider eSTEeM-funded project I’m leading, which looks more broadly at how students regulate emotions when learning online.

Why emotion regulation matters

Emotions play a central role in learning and academic success (Pekrun, 2024). Pleasant emotions such as excitement and enjoyment can enhance motivation, focus, and persistence. On the other hand, unpleasant emotions such as frustration, anxiety, or boredom, if left unmanaged, can undermine engagement and achievement, and even have longer-term impacts on health and wellbeing.

Being able to effectively regulate emotions—such as by reducing unhelpful feelings and maintaining those that support learning—is therefore a crucial skill. Successful emotion regulation helps students to stay engaged with challenging tasks, recover from setbacks, and maintain the motivation needed for independent study.

While emotion regulation has been widely studied in traditional, face-to-face higher education, much less is known about how students manage their emotions in online environments. In particular, we know little about how online students make use of digital technologies to manage their emotional states – a phenomenon referred to as digital emotion regulation (Wadley et al, 2020). This is what our paper set out to explore.

What students told us

We surveyed 92 undergraduate students in the OU’s Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and asked three questions:

Do you use digital technologies to manage your emotions during study?
If so, which technologies do you use?
How and why do you use them?

The results showed that 65% of students reported using digital technologies to regulate their emotions. From a predefined list of different technologies, music streaming platforms (e.g., Spotify), video streaming platforms (e.g., YouTube), and communication tools external to the university (e.g., WhatsApp) were found to be most commonly used.

From students’ open-ended responses, five themes were identified that highlight how and why digital technologies were used for emotion regulation:

Listening to music and audio: Many students used calming playlists to reduce stress and aid concentration, while others chose energetic tracks to increase motivation. A few noted, however, that music could sometimes become a distraction.
Digital media as a tool for diversion and distraction: Games, videos, or social media offered quick relief from stress and study fatigue. Some students, though, recognised the risk of drifting from short breaks into procrastination.
Online communication tools facilitate emotional expression and foster social support: Informal spaces such as WhatsApp helped students share feelings and connect with peers, while module forums and tutor emails offered reassurance and academic guidance.
Digital applications for supporting productivity: Tools such as timers, reminders, and digital to-do lists helped break tasks into smaller, manageable steps, easing feelings of overwhelm and supporting focus.
Digital tools for supporting self-care and wellbeing: Mindfulness, meditation, and exercise apps were used to manage stress and support mindfulness and overall wellbeing.

It was clear that students’ responses highlighted both the benefits of using digital technologies for emotion regulation, such as enhanced concentration, social support, and quick emotional relief, as well as the risks, including distraction, procrastination, and excessive screen time.

Implications

The findings suggest that online learners are already using everyday technologies in creative ways to help manage their emotions. For educators and learning designers, this raises important questions:

How can we share effective strategies, such as using music playlists and productivity apps, that many students are already using successfully?
How might we design modules to create more opportunities for informal social support among learners?
How can we help students use digital technologies to support their emotional regulation while also managing potential risks, such as distractions and increased screen time?

Addressing these questions could help identify small but meaningful ways to create more emotionally supportive online learning environments and, in turn, improve students’ chances of academic success.

Find out more

If you’d like to explore this work in more detail, you can read our full paper in the ECTEL 2025 conference proceedings. You can find further information about the wider eSTEeM-funded project on students’ emotion regulation when learning online on the eSTEeM project webpage. You can also contact us at: [email protected].

References

Pekrun, R. (2024). Control-value theory: From achievement emotion to a general theory of human emotions. Educational Psychology Review, 36(83). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09909-7

Wadley, G., Smith, W., Koval, P., & Gross, J. J. (2020). Digital emotion regulation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(4), 412-418. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0963721420920592

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